It sounds like a dance step or something straight from the pages of science fiction, but Leduc planners are hopeful an aerotropolis will help the regional economy reach new heights.

Aviation officials and representatives from the City of Leduc and Leduc County are collaborating on the project, which would see a 214-hectare parcel of land just south of Edmonton International Airport turned into a major development that would include hotels and restaurants, exhibition and conference centres, and manufacturing and distribution firms.

“The idea is to use the airport as an economic lever,” said Myron Keehn, the vice-president of commercial development at Edmonton International Airport. “It is a collaborative approach to drive the economy.”

One of only two airports in Canada identified as an emerging aerotropolis, Edmonton joins Vancouver in trying to duplicate the success of Amsterdam and Frankfurt, which have created successful economic corridors using a similar strategy. A portion of the parcel designated for the project, which has been under review for five years, overlaps with land proposed for annexation by the City of Edmonton.

“It is not a project that was launched as a result of that,” said Sylvan Losier, manager of long-range planning for the City of Leduc. “It is a regional concept that is not about who has jurisdiction, but what’s best for the area when it comes to land use.

“The success will be in the small details of how we collaborate. It has to be a regional project. There is not one municipality that could do this by itself.”

Keehn said numerous companies have set up operations to facilitate the recent expansion of the airport’s cargo capacity, and an outlet mall proposed on adjacent land should also help fuel the aerotropolis by attracting restaurants and hotels and creating demand for office buildings.

Announced in December, the mall will be built along the highway on the west side of the airport and offer 85 stores with a combined 350,000 square feet of retail space.

The aerotropolis would also benefit from its proximity to the Nisku Energy Park, which employs more than 28,000 tradesmen, and the 283-hectare Port Alberta development site, a warehousing and distribution hub on airport property.

Airport officials and representatives from the City of Leduc and Leduc County announced last week that they have undertaken a study to create a timeline and prioritize projects within the aerotropolis. Simultaneously, they are also evaluating existing land-use plans to ensure that roads, bridges and other infrastructure will be sufficient to meet future demand.

Officials from six municipalities put their differences aside to help an aerotropolis flourish in Dallas. In other countries, related development has spread 50 kilometres beyond the airports.

“We have a golden opportunity,” Losier said. “It is something that would benefit a majority of the Capital Region. At the end of the day, it is about providing businesses better opportunities.

“We are not trying to divide the pie, we are trying to make a bigger pie.”

What: An aerotropolis is a financial hub that extends out from a large airport into the surrounding area. It evolves around businesses that feed off one another and their proximity to the airport — distribution and export centres, manufacturing firms, conference and exhibition facilities, office space, retail, hotels and restaurants, among others.

Taking flight: The term was first proposed by New York commercial artist Nicholas DeSantis, whose drawing of an airport on a rooftop skyscraper was published in the November 1939 issue of Popular Science. The idea has been substantially expanded in recent years by University of North Carolina professor John Kasarda, who believes airports foster urban development today just as highways, railroads and seaports did in previous centuries.

Flourishing aerotropoli: The main hub for FedEx and the second-busiest airport in the world for cargo traffic after Hong Kong, Memphis bills itself as “America’s Aerotropolis.” With a daytime population of 62,000 and the highest rental prices in the country, Amsterdam’s Schipol Airport has become the financial hub of the Netherlands. Other successful aerotropoli exists in Frankfurt, at Hong Kong’s Chek Lap Kok Airport, Incheon Airport in South Korea, Kuala Lumpur, and developments around Dulles in northern Virginia and Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport, Dallas-Fort Worth, Las Vegas and Louisville. Cities with an aerotropolis under development include Abu-Dhabi, Atlanta, Barcelona, Budapest, Delhi, Dubai, Dublin, Johannesburg, Moscow, Oslo and Paris.

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